Boil down Chris Cillizza’s Fix piece this morning, and Wendy Davis’ bad week matters because what she really needs to do is run a creditable campaign that helps Democrats become competitive again in Texas.

There’s some truth to that. Democrats haven’t won statewide in Texas in a very long time. The odds of Wendy Davis winning have always been long. Their 2010 governor nominee, Bill White, was about as credible a candidate as they have fielded. The energy executive and former Houston mayor managed to run a mostly not awful campaign, but never really came close to unseating Rick Perry. It didn’t help that, like many Democrats, White had an anti-gun past he had to run away from. White had signed on with Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Bad move. He might as well have tried to ban BBQ and high school football.

Wendy Davis is not Bill White, and the GOP’s likely nominee, Greg Abbott, is not Rick Perry. Both of those are bad things for the Democrats.

White at least did not rise to fame by filibustering to defend late-term abortion and keeping abortion clinics less regulated than most Texans believe they should be. He never really rose to fame at all, but once he was the Democrats’ nominee, he presented a credible alternative. Perry, the Democrat turned Republican that the media and Democrats love to belittle, tore Bill White to shreds and beat him 55% to 42%. Texas roadsides are littered with Democrats who thought little of Perry and tried to beat him.

Perry, for all his policy virtues, has been in office long enough to have built up considerable fatigue. Democrats and the media mock him and a couple of his gaffes make that task easier. Abbott and his GOP primary rival Tom Pauken* are both veterans of Texas politics and are not gaffe-prone. Presuming Abbott prevails in the primary, he brings a strong, conservative record as attorney general and a menacing $27 million campaign war chest to the general election. Abbott will be backed by a GOP that has become an organizational power again under chairman Steve Munisteri (disclosure: I worked at the Texas GOP under its last three chairmen, including Mr. Munisteri). Abbott speaks well in speeches and in interviews and can debate as well as anyone. He is formidable, yet friendly and even inspiring.

Ever since Ann Richards, Texas Democrats have attacked their Republican rivals with a mix of disdain and insults. That hasn’t really worked for them and it won’t work on Abbott at all. Abbott also ticks all the issue boxes for a majority of Texans — pro-life, pro-jobs, pro-border security, pro-Second Amendment, anti-taxes, anti-Washington — while Davis has to convince enough Texans that she isn’t just another creature of the national Democrats. That will be difficult, because that’s exactly what she is. Davis has to create some distance between herself and the Obama-created Battleground Texas group to be viable, while depending on the same group for the bulk of her organizational muscle. That’s no easy task, and so far Davis just doesn’t look like she’s up to it. If she can’t finesse her own campaign, how can she present herself as a plausible governor of the nation’s second most populous state?

Davis will not have the level of money that Abbott will have, she does not have a well-organized state party, and her mouth has become her own worst enemy. Tweeting that Greg Abbott, who is paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair, has not “walked a day in my shoes” is but the latest Davis howler. Whether that line was a sly nod to the pink shoes that made her a media star or not, it was definitely dumb. Saying that Abbott, who spent a year in rehab after the accident that paralyzed him, does not know struggle is just stunningly stupid.

Davis simply is not running the kind of campaign that Cillizza says she needs to to help her party.

Back in December, Davis went to New York for a fundraiser — one of her many fundraisers in liberal enclaves outside the state — and called Texas “toxic.” If you want people to vote for you, it’s probably not a good idea to liken them and policies they support to poison.

Davis’ national claim to fame is that abortion filibuster last year. But in a show of breathtaking pandering and dishonesty, she traveled to strongly pro-life Rio Grande Valley back in November and declared that she is “pro-life.” If Wendy Davis is pro-life, then the term has no meaning anymore.

Call the state she wants to elect her “toxic.” Shamelessly lie about your position on two huge issues in Texas. This is not a credible campaign that will lead to Democrats becoming more competitive in Texas. It may win her a recurring role on MSNBC, though, which many suspect is her real goal.

Davis has given up a major howler at the rate of about one a month since last fall. This month, she had already blown her big education policy rollout, providing zero numbers to back it up and then saying that she wanted her campaign to take on issues “as a ship takes on water.” Davis evidently hasn’t spent much time in a boat and doesn’t know that when ships take on water, they sink.

Davis has also used this awful week (awful for her; it’s hilarious for those of us covering her) to rip into veteran political reporter Wayne Slater, diss the Austin American-Statesman, which is only the paper that generates the most state politics reporting, and lose Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka. Maybe she can manage to alienate the Texas Tribune while she’s at it. The week is far from over, and national media from the WaPo to Esquire are noticing that Davis may be a one-hit wonder.

In a campaign environment that never favored her, gaffe machine Wendy Davis has managed to devalue a Harvard education. And it’s only Wednesday of her bad week, and it’s only January in the election cycle.

*Pauken dropped out of the GOP primary last month.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

Even without the lies and gaffes, her portrayal of Texas women as weak, oppressed victims doesn't fly. The vast majority of Texas women are tough, gun-toting, and capable of living their lives without Abortion Barbie's help.

As a Texas woman, I find her personal story insulting. She used a sugar daddy to get ahead and is no better than some of the young eye candy you saw draped on the arm of some old, Democrat oil man from the 70's. She comes across as one of the extras that JR went through during the glory days of the old Dallas TV show.

I hope she does get that PMSNBC gig and goes to live with 'her people'...the liberals in New York. After all, according to Cuomo, she is his kind of New Yorker.

Wendy is in it for, well, Wendy. Forget Gov of Texas; she really doesn't want the job. It's just a great way to collect donations from liberal fat cats.

She is trying to create a campaign nest egg so that when she moves to DC after losing the election, she can be a talking head on CNN/MSNBC, and she can try to get a gig in a 2016 Hillary! administration.

Notice to Sugar Daddys in the DC Metro area; Wendy is looking for YOU!

This is all amusing, but immaterial. Progressivism is a secular evangelical religion. The Dems will vote in lockstep for anyone who makes the right noises and angrily shun any stimuli -- including the facts -- that intrude on their narrative.

The Dems in Texas openly boast that if they can turn Texas just 51% blue -- and 40% of the state went for Chocolate Nixon in the last election -- they can ensure the White House never sees another Republican president. They openly gloat over the prospect of one party rule at the state and national levels. It is their dearest wish. This is why Organized For Action is pumping money and effort into the place.

The warning about Wendy Davis is that she, like many other infuriating Democrats, are good at generating FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. They get away with it because the media is too lazy and too biased to call them on their crap.

The whole point of the "war on women" and "the Tea party is racist" memes was to throw as much FUD as they could to mis-characterize and discredit their ideological and political opponents. The MSM is full of Democrat FUD enablers willing to carry the water. Or in this case, gasoline to throw on a fire.

Wendy's responses to criticism and scrutiny of her own story are pretty indicative of how she'll govern. Battleground Texas is nothing but a FUD storm to introduce Chicago style Alinskyite machine politics, and Wendy Davis is the standard bearer, playing identity based politics, pandering to every grievance they can.

They don't care about what happens in Texas, it can all burn for all they care, they just want Texas's electoral votes, and the quickest way to do it is to destroy what works in this state and get as many people on the dole as they can.

If Wendy wins, Texas can change it's tagline from "Don't mess with Texas" to "What's in it for Wendy?"

Even without the lies and gaffes, her portrayal of Texas women as weak, oppressed victims doesn't fly. The vast majority of Texas women are tough, gun-toting, and capable of living their lives without Abortion Barbie's help.

As a Texas woman, I find her personal story insulting. She used a sugar daddy to get ahead and is no better than some of the young eye candy you saw draped on the arm of some old, Democrat oil man from the 70's. She comes across as one of the extras that JR went through during the glory days of the old Dallas TV show.

I hope she does get that PMSNBC gig and goes to live with 'her people'...the liberals in New York. After all, according to Cuomo, she is his kind of New Yorker.

But, she is getting coverage in a Red, albeit large and important, state; thus no one is talking about blue states...at all.

My long time rant has been that we, conservatives, need to run, baby, run, everywhere, all the time...loose and run again. Why? Have you ever seen a nature film where an octopus is poked? It immediately balls up into a defensive fetal position. If we run, run, run in the bluest of blue districts we force the powers that be to play defense...and we train a lot of good people for the bigger prize, especially when walls begin to crack.

If the RNC really wanted to do something, it could recruit young attractive candidates in firmly Dem districts and run them. The loosing would toughen them up.

"Tweeting that Greg Abbott, who is paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair, has not 'walked a day in my shoes' is but the latest Davis howler." Sounds like she's from the Joe "Stand up Chuck" Biden wing of the party.

Byran, the AP story you linked to last night -- where Davis came out against a state income tax and for expanded concealed carry access -- is where her campaign should have been back when she first announced back in September.

The problem is Wendy and her handlers were so excited about all the national media attention and the big bi-coastal donors her abortion filibuster attracted, she's run her campaign for the past four months as if she's running for Andrew Cuomo or Jerry Brown's job, not Rick Perry's. Greg Abbott's campaign wanted to define Wendy Davis as 'Abortion Barbie' and at least until sometime on Tuesday, Wendy Davis' campaign apparently wanted to define Wendy Davis as 'Abortion Barbie', mainly because the abortion issue was the only reason the big media or those big bi-coastal donors cared anything about Wendy Davis.

She pandered to the Democratic Party's liberal elites, who in turn tried to help her tie her life history into the reason for her pro-abortion fight. Now that the life history has been shown to be a little less than meets the eye, she seems to have decided to go back to the 'moderate Wendy' image she needed to win election and re-election in her Fort Worth state Senate district. We're still 10 months out from Election Day, but my guess is barring some major scandal in Austin or oil price plunge, she's already set her image in too many Texas voters' minds to turn things around.